Looking Back at 'Witness,' Harrison Ford's Fantastic (and Fantastically Odd) Fish-Out-of-Water Hit

This month marks the thirtieth anniversary of a film that, at the time of its release, seemed like a mishmash of bad ideas and incompatible genres: A semi-pacifist thriller with a swooning romance at its core; a subtle, sincere drama with a high-concept premise —Amish cop! —  better suited for a broad comedy; and a star-driven studio picture that forced its charismatic lead to tone down his roguish charms.

That movie was Peter Weir’s Witness, the Harrison Ford-starring thriller that would go on to earn eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. Everything about Witness was unusual, starting with its origin story. Screenwriters William Kelley and Pamela & Earl W. Wallace were TV veterans with no major big-screen credits before (or after) this one, and the plot they concocted seemed ripe for mockery: A big-city police officer goes into hiding in Pennsylvania’s Amish community to protect a young boy (and his widowed mother) after the child witnesses a murder perpetrated by corrupt cops.

The script had made the rounds in Hollywood for most of the 1980s, with the first studio, 20th Century Fox passing on the film, reportedly because the company didn’t make “rural movies.” But Paramount stepped up, and after a few false starts with casting (Sylvester Stallone recently confessed he’d passed on the movie), Ford signed up, with Australian director Peter Weir (The Year Of Living Dangerously) brought in to direct.

The movie was a bold choice for Ford. The actor had spent the first half of the ‘80s mostly alternating between playing Indiana Jones and Han Solo, and Witness was his first real foray into quieter, more nuanced work. Nevertheless, the studio sold the movie as, well, a Harrison Ford film, with a trailer that positioned it as a gritty, gnarly B-movie soaked with neon and an ominous synth score.

So it’s likely some moviegoers were baffled by the film’s Ford-free first scene, which quietly and meditatively introduces us to the Amish world. It’s a sorrowful time: Rachel (Kelly McGillis, in what became a breakthrough role) has lost her husband, and she, her son, and the rest of the community are in deep mourning. Yet Weir and the writers are determined not to make Witness maudlin: The first lines of English dialogue in the film are spoken by a group of joking Amish men, immediately humanizing a world that could be very alien. Instead, it’s “our” world that’s the strange one, as we see it through the eyes of Rachel’s eight-year-old son Samuel (Lukas Haas, who’d grow up to appear in films like Inception and Lincoln), as he experiences the big city for the first time.

Weir imbues these early moments with a real sense of awe and wonder — a tactic that pays off beautifully as the plot kicks in: Samuel goes to the bathroom, and witnesses two men (including future Lethal Weapon star Danny Glover) murder another.

It’s a brutal act, but doubly so because we see it from the point of view of a total innocent: Not just a child, but one who’s grown up in an entirely pacifist community. This question of pacifism vs. violence becomes a key theme of the film, and one that makes it a very rare bird among the movies of the Reagan-era 1980s, when shoot’-em-up action heroes dominated.

The killing draws in Ford’s character, a detective named John Book. His turn here — quiet but forceful — is arguably the best of his career (and the only one for which he’s been Oscar-nominated). Granted, Book isn’t a wildly original character, but Ford imbues him with real depth and humanity. Initially irritated by his Amish charges, he’s then forced to hide out with them, leading to a deepening respect for their ways. And he does it without looking ridiculous when he has to milk a cow or help raise a barn, something that sees him slowly win over Rachel with his inherent decency.

As effective as it proves as a thriller, it’s hard to imagine that Witness would have become what it was without the love story at its center. John and Rachel clearly have a connection from the moment they meet: Even if she’s initially hostile and suspicious of his big-city ways, they soon find a grow closer, particularly after they share a dance to Sam Cooke’s “What A Wonderful World” in the barn. Their romance is the real heart of the film.

In contrast to the soft-focus, semi-explicit eroticism of other 1980s movies, though, theirs is a chaste, thwarted romance, with more in common with Edith Wharton than, say, 9 1/2 Weeks.

The result is something genuinely sexy, a rarity in screen romances, and it gives their one moment of real contact — as Rachel removes her bonnet and kisses Ford in the mist — the emotional force of a dam bursting. The studio’s decision to release the film just before Valentine’s Day suddenly seemed very smart.

For a film sold as a macho thriller, Witness has a decidedly light touch; it focuses on the romance, and even includes some sprinklings of fish-out-of-water humor, but it mostly plays its unique Amish-setting surprisingly straight.

Throughout, Weir imbues the film with a real respect for the Amish and their values of pacifism and non-resistance, which is another reason the movie feels like an oddity: Upon its release, the Cold War was still in effect, and fears of nuclear conflict were still very much on the minds of everyone. Yet here was a thriller from a major studio, starring one of the biggest action heroes around, that mostly advocated for peace. Not just that: In a suspicious, xenophobic time, this was a movie that treated a foreign culture with empathy and humor, challenging mainstream audiences and suggesting that they might have more similarities, rather than differences, with the Amish.

Reviews were mostly strong when Witness opened: Roger Ebert called it “an electrifying and poignant love story” (though not everyone was convinced: the New York Times dismissed it as “not much fun”). It didn’t come roaring out of the gate at the box office either, opening at number two, behind mega-hit Beverly Hills Cop (which was in its tenth week in a remarkably lengthy run at the top). But it proved a slow-burning, word-of-mouth hit, rising to number one in its fifth week, and eventually ending up the eighth-biggest film of 1985, out-grossing The Goonies and The Breakfast Club.

Hollywood didn’t forget either: A full year after its release, the film was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, and would eventually win for Screenplay and Editing. Others have tried to bottle the film’s magic (like 1992’s A Stranger Among Us, in which Melanie Griffith goes undercover in the Hasidic Jewish community), but to little avail.

It’s not surprising, really: Witness shouldn’t have worked at all, and that it does so well feels almost miraculous. Even in its time, it was an oddity. Now, it’s almost impossible to believe that it could be made. Thirty years on, let’s be glad that it was.